Law of nature exists in health/fitness

I've always been a people watcher. But I don't watch to watch. I watch to wonder.

To wonder what's the motivation behind the action.

My wondering was given a great deal of direction in high school when we read the ancient Greek play Oedipus Rex, and my teacher made an observation about the main character, Oedipus. She said that although he's a one-in-a-million man whose fiery temper and quick thinking cause him to become king, he's also emblematic of every man because like every man, Oedipus's greatest strengths are also his greatest weaknesses.

Mull over that idea for a moment then honestly assess yourself. My guess is that the qualities that got you your job could be the same ones keeping you from a promotion, that those qualities that attracted your mate to you are also the ones that causes him or her to complain at times.

You are part of nature and therefore subject to its laws, and one that's inexorable is the duality of life, that things always have a yin and a yang, a black and a white, a good and a bad. The fire that destroys the forest, for instance, also creates the conditions to produce the next one.

This law of nature also exists in health and fitness and offers insight into why certain people love eating junk food and certain people love working out.

These desires, it seems, come from the same natural compound. It's just that different people create the compound differently.

Three weeks ago, you read about research published last year in the Journal of Clinical Investigation that found a way to reduce the feeling of sadness by 50 percent: Eat foods with a high fatty acid content, like macaroni and cheese, ice cream, or mashed potatoes slathered in butter. That occurred because the ingestion of fat causes the stomach to produce endocannabinoids, a feel-good chemical that's rather similar chemically to the active ingredients in cannabis, the ingredient found in hemp that gives marijuana its mind-altering affect.

The researchers feel that this chemical reaction to fat is a holdover from our caveman days. Back then, overeating after a kill was a necessity.

But another necessity back then was the caveman's ability to track an animal for hours, to attack it, and to run an injured animal down. Sometimes the process took hours, sometimes days, but the effort always took something else.

Aerobic activity something that many health and fitness fanatics now seem positively addicted to. Researchers have now found an explanation for this sort of behavior.

Hard aerobic exercise causes the body to produce that same feel-good chemical, endocannabinoids, that gets produced when you eat fatty foods.

In research published in The Journal of Experimental Biology, blood samples were taken from rather diverse subjects recreational runners, pet dogs, and laboratory ferrets after exercising on a treadmill. Historically, humans and dogs have needed aerobic endurance to succeed in the hunt. Ferrets have not.

So what the researchers discovered really should come as no surprise. After exercising on a treadmill, the humans and the dogs in the study had a concentration of one specific endocannabinoid in the their blood, but the ferrets didn't. Moreover, in tests to determine state of mind, the humans were much happier after exercise.

Talk about irony. That guy who blares his car horn and then buzzes the cyclist on his way to Burger King for a burger, French fries, and sugar water is actually craving the same sensation that makes the cyclist willing to brave the dangers of the open road. The exerciser who limits fat ingestion so he or she can better run, hike, or bike really could be getting that feel-good sensation that the exercise produces at gut-busting meals, too.

While this discovery may seem to be the solution to the obesity epidemic, the researchers conducting the study believe that this is not true. The problem lies in the degree of intensity or duration needed in the aerobic exercise to produce the feel-good compound.

Most people who are obese would not be capable of such an effort; therefore, the thought of simply swapping the modes of producing the endocannabinoids doesn't work.

But the research does give you insight into people.

Just the other day, a teaching colleague told me that his wife can't understand why he likes hitting the heavy bag for so long and so hard that he feels as if he's about to throw up. Now maybe she will.

It's that all's-right-with-the-world feeling that gets produced along with the extreme effort that makes the teacher who hits the heavy bag crave the sensation and want to do it the next day and the day after that.